Esma'/Listen

With Esma’, Beirut Art Center invites artists and composers to share the exhibition space. Whether silent or
audible, their works develop contemporary forms of listening. This specific sensory condition engages with
the awareness of distance and proximity, of interiority and exteriority. Since the ear has no eyelid, our acoustic
sensitivity exposes us to sound before anything else. Listening is constructed on this organic porosity: it is an act
involving various degrees of consciousness and intentionality. It filters, samples, reorganize the sonic material that
we receive. Listening may be immersive or analytical; it may rely on our attention and discernment or on technical
tools. By means of recording and amplification techniques it details, reproduces and translates the sounds.
In light of the ubiquity and increasing efficiency of audiovisual media, the act of listening has become the object
of singular artistic research, both diverse and innovative. It is akin to a project, an experiment and a critical
practice. The artists and composers convened here use sensory modalities in widely different manners, in order
to describe or produce a particular state of reception or interpretation of sound, of the beliefs it entails, the
information it conveys, and the individual and collective territories thus determined. The works in this exhibition
are audiovisual gestures inspired by a practical or imaginary experience of sound, they invent a sensorium in both
formal and conceptual terms. They go beyond the notions of silence and enlargement of the acoustic spectrum,
which were opened up by the work of John Cage, whether to experiment with the potentials and limits of
perception or to reexamine the material and instrumental culture of recording and broadcasting techniques.

Stretching the domain of the audible

The expansion of the acoustic spectrum has been the subject of intense research for the musical avant-garde since
the turn of the 1960s. It was during that time that Alvin Lucier produced music by amplifying his brain’s alpha
waves in Music For Solo Performer (1966) and began to pick up the vibrations of the ionosphere surrounding the
Earth’s magnetic field, otherwise undetectable to the naked ear in Sferics (1981). Around the same time, Pauline
Oliveros developed the concept of ‘Deep Listening’: the process of composition is realized by incorporating
specific resonances, abstracted from the noise of the world. Attentive to aural thresholds and modalities, she
started organizing in the 1980s collective listening sessions in underground, remote locations. Esma’ adopts this
extension of the limits of musical perception as one of its guidelines, particularly with Alvin Lucier’s exceptional
piece Music On A Long Thin Wire (1977). A vibrating string stretched over more than twenty meters is set into
vibration by sine waves and amplified through an electromagnetic field. These waves produce a very pure sound,
where the most tenuous vibrational disturbances become full-fledged acoustic events.
In To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe In Recognition Of Their Desperation (2013), Pauline Boudry and
Renate Lorenz refer to Pauline Oliveros’s eponymous piece. The latter is a tribute to two women who responded to
an unbearable situation with a desperate gesture. Boudry and Lorenz are interested in the emotional and political
charge of listening contained in Oliveros’s piece. Composition is conceived as a space for possible integration in a
community, and endows each performer with an aural ‘responsibility’. Boudry and Lorenz filmed the interpretation
of this piece as a succession of musical exchanges, based on the reciprocity of listening between various
instrumentalists; the cast of performers is also a strong political statement on gender identity.
Composers and performers Sharif Sehnaoui and Cynthia Zaven address the space-time continuum of sound
phenomena by stretching the conditions of the listening experience. In Sound Capsule (2016), Sharif Sehnaoui
proceeds to build a polyphonic structure that will evolve over time in the exhibition, within a specific acoustic
space designed for short concerts which will be given at precise intervals. A recording from each of these concerts
will be subsequently stretched over the duration of the exhibition, constructing a progressive multilayered
composition. The work ends up exposing time itself by means of a process that travels from a primary structure
through a saturated sound field. Cynthia Zaven will present her first piece for voice, For Voice and Forest (2016).
The video will consist of a performance that explores the spatial dimensions of sonic phenomena in a landscape by
reflecting on the perception of distance, scale, and focus: from emergence to near-disappearance.

Listening to objects, materializing the voice

Sound culture has been profoundly shaped by the technologies of recording and broadcasting and by the way
these technologies translate and transpose data, through processes that are accelerated by cycles of obsolescence
and renewal. The materiality of sound capture is a component of listening. Highlighting the role played by the
technological mediation of sound, the exhibition begins with an installation and a video by Christian Marclay.
Since his pioneering experiments with records and ‘turntablism’ (concerts featuring music played from LPs)
within New York’s experimental scene of the 1980s, Marclay has probed intermediate spaces between the senses,
exploring their convertibility by way of a practice that reinvents displacement, reuse and editing. A famous part
of his work focuses on the material life of recording media, such as vinyl records and magnetic tapes, residues of
a sonic memory produced through physical impression. He recycles these objects in environments and sculptures
that highlight the relationship between the recording and migration of sound through portable objects. The vinyl
records covering the floor at the entrance of Esma’, 4,000,000 Minutes (2000/2016) offer visitors an unstable
ground and situation reversal. They are invited to trample these remains, a volume of stored past time; only their
memory and imagination will enable them to temporarily ‘play’ these records, producing a virtual silent cacophony
and an effective destruction. In Mixed Reviews (American Sign Language) (1999-2001), Marclay filmed a hearing
impaired actor interpreting a collage of texts sampled from music criticism, in which writers try to describe the
music they heard, thus commenting on the translatability of the acoustic experience, such as the rivalry between
the visible and the audible.
Artist and writer Moyra Davey annotates her photographs with names and addresses so that the images
carry traces of their life. Bits of tape, scratches and stamps, denote these images’ journey from her studio to
destinations where she chooses to mail them. They generally represent receptacles of memory connected with
everyday life: books, records, places of commemoration. House (Montreal) (2016), consists of nine photographs
that were taken in a shop selling second-hand House Music records and sent from New York. Its physical
transportation by mail allegorizes these multiple displacements and dematerializations: the visual recording that
the photos provide, the audio recording the LPs contain, and the circulation of the shop’s goods. These various
levels of displacements together constitute the myriad of interpretations evoked by the varying spatial and
temporal contexts in which the act of listening takes place.

Seeing hearing

Some contemporary visual artists engage in a subtle dialogue with the aural culture of modernity and its aspiration
to both open and sharpen our acoustic abilities: from the belief of synesthesia, or intimate interconnection
and translatability between the senses, to John Cage’s idea of ‘all sound’ that negated any frontier or hierarchy
between musical language and ordinary or unintentional sounds, this acoustic field that we call ‘noise’. Pierre
Huyghe’s piece Silence Score (1997) engages musical notation in a visual commentary on Cage’s legacy. Huyghe
has made a musical score out of a precise and dated ‘silence’, that of the first 4’33” recording in 1961 of
Cage’s Silence (1952), with all the unintentional noises that can actually be heard in it. The artist reinterprets a
fundamental gesture in the history of art and avant-garde music, to highlight the stakes of a performance which
proposes a radical filter for the amplification of listening. Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson, for their part,
combine a musical and conceptual practice in their approach, by investing primarily visual shapes. Volumes for
Sound (2010) is the result of a score of shapes: those of the Hi-Fi furniture that usually encases the technological
tools used for home listening. Serving simultaneously as stage, listening device and sculpture, the resulting
construction of geometric forms hosts inverted speakers. The sound produced during performances of amplified
music is muffled by these filtering entities. The piece requires the listeners to lend an attentive ear and overactivate
their availability to the music.
Artist Olaf Nicolai also puts into discussion the search for equivalence between hearing and seeing which has
marked modernity. He questions more generally the aspirations of modernity to create a ‘universal language’,
which guided the search for total translatability between artistic disciplines in the early decades of the twentieth
century. Nicolai’s installation Probestücke (specimen) 1(2013) refers to a monument of the genre: the architecture
of Le Corbusier’s Convent of La Tourette, near Lyon, France. This is where Le Corbusier appealed to the musical ear
of Iannis Xenakis to design large stained glass windows, in accordance with his own reliance on the golden section
in designing the proportions of the building. In return, Nicolai relied on the same principle to compose a graphic
space, the equivalent of a visual score that is an invitation to explore the musical imagination. Here, professional
singers give separate readings of these abstract geometric shapes, resulting in strangely similar interpretations
which Nicolai uses as possible paths for non-professional composition.
The work of Jessica Warboys confronts more directly the surrounding space of sound vibrations. The practice of
this British artist encompasses several media - sculpture, painting, film and sound - and is generally based on the
processes of transformation of materials, stretched to the point of instability. She emphasizes the traces of her
own gestures and the manifestations of matter, and her work highlights the process of formation rather than the
finished form. The spiral configuration of Hinge Bow (2013) creates the image of an acoustic cornet with folded
or sliced sheets of paper. Composed in collaboration with musician and sound artist Morten Norbye Halvorsen,
the vibratory soundtrack, structured from sine waves, seems to wind and unwind the shape wrapped around the
sculpture, establishing a fragile dialogue between the visible and the ambient.

Soundtracks of the public space

Finally, the works of Francis Alÿs, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Vartan Avakian are concerned with the politics of
listening in the public space. Francis Alÿs’s practice since 1994 initiates links and circulates meaning quite literally,
by means of his wanderings in the public space. Alÿs strives to destabilize the shape and power of institutions
with performative, intentionally minor gestures. His practice is inseparable from that of drawing and painting,
and reinstates the representation between the notion of project and its capacities for incarnation. The gesture
performed in Railings, London (2004) seems insignificant: the artist plays with the space of a city, London,
striking various gates he encounters while walking. In this manner he is taking an element from the vocabulary of
architecture, which functions as a threshold and boundary between two spaces, and places it in another field of
resonance. The artist unfolds the visual and territorial vibration emitted by the gate to the beat of his journey.
More recently, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has developed audiovisual installations and essays, which comment
on the significant presence of sound as an indicator and public marker within societies of information and
discrimination and their specific technologies. Conversations With An Unemployed (2013) and The All Hearing
(2013) address the culture of amplification and noise pollution in the public space in Cairo, notably by looking at
the material layers of sound recorded on magnetic tapes, while his most recent video work, Rubber Coated Steel
(2016) depicts a ballistics trial based on sound analysis.
The exhibition also includes a piece that connects the external space with the inside. Vartan Avakian’s project
invests the area of the river and the neighborhood of Beirut Art Center. In Composition with a Recurring Sound
he tries to capture a sound eradicated by urban planning: that of the Beirut river, now hidden behind high walls
and reduced in recent years to a trickle of water and sewage, to the point where people living nearby are for the
most part unaware of its existence. The almost inaudible character of this sonic movement renders Avakian’s
intervention a gesture of resistance rather than documentation. The piece will be physically present in the show in
a very discreet way. Visitors are invited to walk to some spots in the public space where they can experience the
impermeability of the barriers separating the city from the river, and can actually witness the limits of the city, as
drawn by the river. They will effectively have to strain their ears to distinguish the near-silence of the water amid
Beirut’s dense soundtrack.